Features
DYSTOPIAN FILTERS Ethel Lilienfeld Considers the Nuances of our Virtual Selves
Technology cannot be separated from the world we live in today. Indeed, post-pandemic, we are...
SHATTERED Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme Find Meaning in Remembrance and Resistance
In the 18th century, when the Iranian elite heard rumors of the grand mirrored halls of Europe,...
AS THE WORLD TURNS Deborah Stratman Gazes Into the Abyss of Time
“I’m not sure satisfaction is a thing I feel while making art. I get satisfied from stuff like...
Reviews
GALLERY ROUNDS: Groove The Hammer Museum
“Groove,” an exhibition of approximately 100 intaglio prints currently on view at the Hammer...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Rhea Dillon Soft Opening at Paul Soto
There’s no trick of the moonlight at Rhea Dillon’s show, “Gestural Poetics.” Inside and out, each...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Aly Helyer Vielmetter
In the arresting painting On Your Side (2024), a person and their cat canoodle in twinned profiles...
Columns
REMARKS ON COLOR: Truman’s “Buck Stops Here” Brown May's Hue
The story is legendary, and one would think where money is concerned, or even mentioned at all,...
BUNKER VISION The Prime-Time Underground Film
The history of film is full of paradigm shifts. Once people got used to the idea that the train on...
ART BRIEF The Role of an Art Advisor
Wendy Posner is the CEO of Posner Fine Arts, an international art advisory based in Los Angeles....
Departments
From the Editor May/June Volume 18, issue 5
Dear Reader, In the early Artillery days, I assigned a writer to critique the films and videos...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Frieze LA, Spring/Break, Gana Art LA's Quiet Opening
I don’t know about you, but I’m still recovering from Frieze LA (Feb. 29–March 3), and the art...
POEMS "Chalk Poem" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Chalk Poem The long cool freedom pure as a stick of chalk powdering against the edge of jealousy...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Rhea Dillon Soft Opening at Paul Soto
There’s no trick of the moonlight at Rhea Dillon’s show, “Gestural Poetics.” Inside and out, each work happens twice. Dillon’s drawings, nestled in sapele mahogany boxes within the white cube gallery, enact two histories at once. While the moniker “sapele” hails from a Nigerian city, the hardwood was once used to build slave ships, consequently disrupting how to read Dillon’s works against the supposedly neutral space of a gallery. Inset in boxes propped against the walls, her oil-stick drawings of spades emerge in clamorous flesh tones or occasional bursts of yellow or purple. If this exhibition intends to release the recognition of Blackness from an object or commodity and lean into Blackness as a natural form of abstraction, the entirety of the show is clever, verve and precise. Dillon’s sensitivity to Black hyper-visibility recovers a sense of amorphicity for Blackness through reconfiguring canons of representation. In probing questions about this long crisis of recognition and addressability, an intimate relationship between imaging, the world and “the way things are,” I came to the contradictory question: Is it wonderful that she has created these works or should I be outraged that the world is this sinister?
Paul Soto
2271 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 1, 2024
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Chyrum Lambert la BEAST Gallery
With rich, saturated hues on both black and cream backgrounds, Chyrum Lambert’s collages on wooden panels are mysterious yet familiar, reminiscent of botanical illustrations or a rock collection display. Titled “An Alphabet of Looking,” the show provides a chance to parse the artist’s visual language—cutting from his large assortment of painted paper, Lambert adheres various shapes to their own smaller, wooden rectangle, which creates a three-dimensional grid on each piece. The isolated parts making the whole, his organic shapes are compositionally categorized by the artist’s system, the gestural brushstrokes contrasting with the precision of his scissors.
la BEAST Gallery
Chyrum Lambert :: Electric & Infinite Body: An Alphabet of Looking
831 Cypress Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90065
On view through June 8, 2024
POEMS "Chalk Poem" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Chalk Poem
The long cool freedom
pure as a stick of chalk
powdering against the
edge of jealousy
hard and green, also cool
a tongue in your mouth
an equation in your mind
about where
purity goes
as it’s clapped against
a tree trunk,
the side of a building
leaving squares of dust,
only its traces.
—Caitlin Brady
The Lugubrious Game
Do you ever look at the work of your friends
purely in order to marvel
at its shortcomings: to spitefully wallow,
with sheer horror and disbelief,
in its shockingly abysmal incompetence,
and cheerfully reassure yourself
of its utterly irredeemable worthlessness?
If not, you are missing out
on one of life’s greatest pleasures.
So much more pleasurable than
looking at a friend’s work and finding
that it surpasses anything
you could ever hope to achieve.
—John Tottenham